quotage: 'When it was announced yesterday that the two firms would be teaming up for a new initiative, some joked that it would be to push TaaS – Toothbrush as a Service! In fact it was a potentially far more significant alliance that was announced with the cloud CRM firm teaming up with Philips Healthcare to stake a claim to the emerging cloud healthcare market.'

The health care cloud market has not been a fluffy pillow for SaaS initiatives to date (Stuart cites Google's ill-fated Google Health initiative as one example of the 'high risk/high reward' stakes). That said with projected health cloud spending cited in the $5.4 billion range by 2014, you can see why Salesforce.com and Philips are shifting the Salesforce.com health care push well beyond 'Toothbrush as a Service'.

The fact that this announcement took place in EMEA is worth noting, given the presence of Salesforce.com's European data centers and its newly-branded Salesforce Tower London. Talk about tacking cloud and privacy fears head on. Put this on the short list of SaaS stories to watch.

Quotage: 'This was the first MongoDBWorld and was a very different type of event to that which I am used to. No overt flogging, plenty of product meat, mercifully short keynotes and top class customer references to the point of being spoilt for choice.' - MongoDB World 2014 - The Wrap

Best of the rest

quotage: 'The drawing board for all of these newly created disruptors isn’t a better retail store or a cheaper factory. The drawing board for these mentioned disruptors comprises of data in an excel sheet and a code editor. This is the new battleground that the digitally savvy C-Suite is quickly becoming aware of... Every single one of these disruptors has the luxury of ring-fencing your customer and rethinking the product entirely, without the baggage of your current demand and supply chain.'

myPOV: Readers know I'm not a big fan of disruption lingo, nor am I generally a fan of 'this wave of disruption is different'. In this piece, Patel embraces both, but in a manner that found me grudgingly nodding my head despite my built-in biases. SAP's Patel is arguing that being 'Ubered' is very different than what being 'Amazoned' was like in the late 1990s (see above quotage).

Whether that means incumbents are in mortal danger is a matter of debate - I'd say that depends heavily on the industry for starters. Example: Patel would argue that SAP is an incumbent that can re-invent on the fly and disrupt others in the process. But I'm going to cede him this point: Uber/AirBnB/Travelocity is a different threat altogether than Amazon was back in the day.

I know culture change when I see it; the way people interact with their devices now is categorically different than when I lugged a massive phone around in the Amazon early days (and, yeah, I thought I was pretty damn disruptive). OK Mr. Patel, I'll grant you your disruption. Let's see where it leads.

The new table-stakes: Fixing the Analog Present for a Digital Future - by Phil Fersht - An impassioned series of takeaways from the HfS Cambridge University blueprint summit. And the digital dilemma: 'The overwhelming mood from enterprises is one of frustration to get beyond this tactical status quo of legacy operations, in which so many find themselves wedged.'

If you're looking for a swing and a miss with an enterprisey bent, I'll submit this Larry Ellison fan tribute - err, Oracle cloud analysis - from Pando Daily. Look - Oracle's cloud moves are not to be underestimated, but whether or not Ellison is the inspiration for a Hollywood super hero, or a 'walking personification of Sun Tzu's Art of War' doesn't whet my analytical whistle.